It seems that “cutting back” is a strong theme in our society right now; Cut back hours in front of your TV (ESPN I’ll miss you), cut back calories (pizza doesn’t have calories right?), cut back your spending (no more Starbucks lattes). Where does it end? Unfortunately, it hasn’t ended for many businesses and often means cutting budgets. Noah Mallin wrote a great article on “Advertising in a Recession” for SearchViews and cited a well known fact in the business and marketing world – During an economic downturn, you increase your budget. The New Yorker article Noah mentions does in fact outlines this idea and the proof that it works. However, for many, this is not a possible option and instead you must embrace the budget cut backs. So what do you do?

Well, instead of decreasing your ad spend, you need to focus on how to MAXIMIZE it. Most likely you’ve heard magic business words like “streamlining” and “optimizing” flying around the office lately, but none of them are quite as important as maximizing, because this means not only being as efficient as possible, but GETTING the MOST out of those efficient decisions. This is something we (Advertise.com staffers) hear every day, and we strongly believe in it! Not because we’ve been “drinking the Kool-Aid,” but because we’ve seen it work for companies time and time again. In fact, we’ve helped to make it work.

So before you start slicing things off your ad spending list and imagining the hours of overtime you’ll have to put in, in order to handle the growing workload, consider these best practices:

· Consolidate- It’s time to cut losing campaigns and focus on what performs.

· Centralize- Using SEM tools as well as other softwares that allow you to observe and manage your campaigns from one place makes management more efficient and profitable.

· Optimize- Work with publishers to help remove low performing traffic sources as well as increase exposure on the sources that do perform well.

Noah summed it up nicely when he said, “In a recession it’s important to get as much out of each effort as possible.” So true.